If you were to ask the internet (and let’s face it, you’re better off not doing that), you probably wouldn’t find a consensus for which the ‘best’ SimCity is. Even with surface level research you’d find: 2000 is the favourite of retro purists; 4 is popular for its deep simulation; the original is well-praised but only the ‘favourite’ of belligerent hipsters; heck, even 2013’s well-documented disastrous reboot of SimCity has its fans some 11 years on. But SimCity 3000 is fairly unique in that its fans don’t gush over specific features or wistfully long for the days of city-building done right. Instead, it’s all a little more emotive; to its fans, 3000 is warm, comforting, familiar. And that was intentional.
“It was interesting because my entry into Maxis corresponded with the end of the era of pixel art,” says Ocean Quigley, the art director on . “You had a whole art team – which at the time seemed like a lot of people, half a dozen or eight people – who were doing pixel art, and we were switching over to a scenario where we modelled things and then rendered them instead of hand painting them.” By the late-Nineties, practically everyone was looking to make the switch to 3D as the hot new thing, and developers of well-loved franchises were quickly trying to figure out how to bring their new-fangled 3D version to market quicker than anyone else. “That
